Greta Thunberg And I

Being Truly Grateful For The Little Yellow Canary In The Coal Mine

Credit: Dedale

This week on Jonathan Foster’s The Crow I’m offering you a contemplative personal and political essay on my admiration for a young woman who humbles us all. I hope you enjoy this week’s more columnist style.

1.

In 2018 I was walking home, weaving my way past Riksdaghuset, through Gamla Stan toward Södermalm, in Stockholm, Sweden. It was late August during Sweden’s hottest ever summer. July had been Mediterranean, regularly cooking over 30C for weeks. August mellowed to a ridiculous 28C. The average here is 18C to 22C. The great glacial lakes warmed to a barmy bath temperature under an endlessly beaming sun and the ancient forests smouldered and burned ceaselessly as the wind spread smoke and ashes across the land.

We’d spent July in a rented house with no running water and an outhouse. It was twenty paces to the lake and at night in the relentless heat and glowing atmosphere I was drenched in fever dreams as fleeting flames harried me toward the shoreline. For the first time the summer wild grasses turned a tinder dry brown and the snakes and foxes looked as confused as the caramel roe deer who melted into the landscape.

Sweden was raging in heat and the population was tanned and basking. It hadn’t been like this since the summer of ’75 they said. What about the scorcher of ’47? they asked. People lived on cheap ice cream and expensive watermelon. Who needs St Tropez? Stockholm is the new Riviera, we’ll be planting vineyards next, they laughed.

That extraordinary scorching summer once more confirmed climate chaos as a clear and present danger. But while the media spoke gleefully of a Nordic tourism explosion and argued about the best recipes for cooling cocktails, and the government celebrated the technological improvements in predicting forest fires and applauded a 2.2% GDP, while Britain merrily stumbled about post Brexit and the US amused itself with a racist billionaire president performing his Cut Price Dictator Who To Hate Most Game Show, while all this insanity was thrashing about I walked home on that hot August afternoon and saw a strange small girl sitting beside the Riksdaghuset clutching her homemade School Strike For The Climate sign like a tiny yellow canary in the coal mine, her face fiercely concerned, her posture utterly determined and her demeanour desperately isolated.

And for some reason I was struck by a momentous feeling. A one child army of sanity in all this madness. This was the first time I ever saw Greta Thunberg.

2.

By November of 2018, a mere three months after I wandered past this solitary child sitting beside the Riksdagshuset with her scribbled sign, she had enflamed the world’s youth and instigated school strikes across the globe. The world had been anxious with climate chaos concern and suddenly out of the blue this 15 year old girl had become the lightning conductor for an emotional explosion that had been hitherto meticulously dampened by the world’s corporations, institutions and governments.

By January 2019, she was in Davos, at the World Economic Forum telling world leaders that “Our house is on fire,” in what was without doubt one of the most candid speeches Davos has ever witnessed.

By March 2019 she had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. May brought about Time magazine’s nomination for Person Of The Year and by August, one year after sitting quietly and ferociously in her yellow raincoat, she was sailing toward the United States to deliver a speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit that still brings shivers to my bones.

The US’s Fake Tanned Dictator-In-Waiting had flirted with the event before arrogantly breezing out of the UN general assembly chamber to continue stirring up social unrest in his never ending quest to glorify and enrich himself and his fellow sociopathic private power mongers.

Shortly after his departure Greta (who had now joined the Only One Name Club) climbed onto the stage and berated the powerful, rich and privileged luminaries by demanding to know how they dared pretend “that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions?” Like a fierce fairy charged with the energy of a generation she glowered at the world’s elite and warned, “We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”

By October she had won the Right Livelihood Award and as the year slid into the next she launched a child rights-driven coronavirus campaign, supported Sweden’s Sámi population in their fight to protect their land from mining and forestry and engaged the world’s media as a regular one person social and environmental movement.

Meanwhile, the Multiple Bankrupted Racist Dictator was blathering to the world’s medical community that ultraviolet light or injecting bleach was the obvious answer to the so-called pandemic, after all bleach kills toilet germs in one minute, maybe even less than a minute, 30 seconds, who knows, maybe even 10 seconds.

3.

Throughout 2022 I was producing a podcast for Swedish and Thai environmental and health organisations that explored youth perspectives on climate and health. The work was both invigorating and depressing. From Fiji to Argentina to Egypt to Nepal, the world was full of people trying to make a difference. Energetic, intelligent and dedicated young activists desperate for change appeared on the podcast to discuss and spread their ideas in the hope of igniting public action. This was hugely invigorating.

However, over time I slowly came to the realisation that most of the activists were, to varying degrees, being held hostage by their funding stream organisations and undergoing the meticulous process of institutionalisation. Their activities and opinions were being quietly curated as part of an unspoken agreement with power that gave them access to the world’s stage as long as their script was within the boundaries acceptable to power. This was hugely depressing.

Mostly people act in a socially intuitive manner, they read the room and almost without noticing veer toward the social consensus. This tendency in complex social animals (and hierarchically structured organisations) can help to encourage unity in a group with diverse personalities and needs. But it is also problematic in large hierarchical organisations when fast and dramatic change is required, especially considering these types of hierarchies are designed to be resistant to change. Add a funding stream to the mix and it’s incredible how malleable people become. On the whole people don’t even notice these mechanisms of power influencing their thoughts and behaviours. It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes working in real time.

The youth activists I interviewed were desperate for social, environmental and value change that would bring about Climate reparations and a more predictable and liveable future, including and often especially, by tackling rampant inequality across the world. But they were also being socialised and institutionalised within their organisations to lean into the idea that change can only happen within the established current political structures. These well intentioned youth activists inevitably became drenched in the very values they had started out fighting against and found themselves subconsciously institutionalised into supporting an increasingly narrow set of values, expectations and processes, or as Greta would put it, they ended up flirting with “business as usual”. Inevitably their hopes for change were narrowed and their voices refined.

After attending environmental conferences and events and meetings and award ceremonies and you name it held in exotic locations, after all the international travel and hotels and fine dining and conferences and being interviewed and feeling increasingly part of the establishment, it’s so easy to become addicted to the ego boost and the lifestyle. Eventually people end up being blunted by the very system they assumed would help them manifest change.

But not everyone. One young woman continuously resisted the clutches of power. Greta Thunberg seemed to have some kind of super power where no kryptonite could subdue her vision and determination. And although that made her incredibly powerful, it also made her a real threat because the powers that be are terrified of those they do not control and cannot understand. Greta was not only clear sighted and morally transparent, she was also impervious to being institutionalised and she wasn’t reliant on traditional organisational funding streams that could be used to “guide” her. She could be a massive asset or a massive threat, as loved as she was feared, a hugely unifying and a hugely divisive figure and everyone wanted a piece of her but no one knew quite what to do with her.

Greta had reached the summit of her fame and power when I saw her for the second time, a mere two years after I first saw her sitting at the Riksdagshuset.

Stockholm may well be an international capital city, but it’s also a small city and my eldest daughter and Greta Thunberg enrolled in the same school at the same time and ended up in the same class.

4.

Greta Thunberg would have been a coup for the podcast, especially at that time when she had an astronomically large and engaged audience. In most media endeavours audience numbers are tantamount to life or death, so it was suggested to me that I might use the fact that my daughter was at the same school to reach out and invite Greta onto the podcast.

I didn’t have to think about it. I said I wasn’t prepared to invade either my daughter’s or Greta’s privacy. I said that I felt this would be wrong and that everybody has the right to occupy a private space that nobody else can enter. Everybody should be able to lead their own life without being continually approached through non-conventional channels with requests or demands for their time. This was accepted and nothing more was said.

She was never asked to appear on the podcast and the following year, after two short seasons the podcast contract came to an end and life went on.

Two years later when my daughter’s class graduated I saw Greta for the third time. Like all graduating kids in Sweden they celebrated their “Utspring” where students run from the school building (nowadays) to pumping music and jump about in joyful celebration. It’s always strange to see famous figures in ordinary and familiar settings but I suppose that’s the curse of fame. It removes people from the tribe and platforms them amongst the gods, which is of course madness because there are no gods, there is only the tribe, from which the famous are strangely ostracised. But Greta knew she was no god, she knew she was just a young person celebrating having finally finished 12 years of schooling.

Meanwhile, at the behest of those who actually believed themselves to be gods, climate chaos continued, despotic rulers started wars, inequality skyrocketed as the infinitely rich occupied themselves by grabbing more and more of the shrinking pie, sociopathic power mongers busied themselves in so-called think tanks and devised plans to increase their power and capitalism kept stumbling toward social, environmental and financial breakdown in its time honoured fashion.

Then, US voters in an fit of angry confusion re-elected the Mouth-Almighty Petulant Dictator Wannabe and opened a new Pandora’s Box, setting the world on an even steeper decline as this emotionally retarded maniac merrily lit the fuse of extremism and hate.

And much like the environmentalist activists I interviewed for the podcast, people began to read the room and intuitively veer toward the new vicious norm. US power began to use its funding streams to demand acquiescence, and in turn nations, corporations and the power hungry around the world began to blunt their ethical and moral responsibilities.

Just like in the scorching Swedish summer of 2018 the world once again started heating up, and with the same old insane irresponsibility the media occupied itself with trivial questions, governments began pointing the finger and blaming the weakest in society (while protecting the most powerful) and the Convicted Sexual Abusing Dictator Felon, various other despots and most of the worlds leaders looked away as the Palestinian people had violence wrought upon them in a state sponsored genocide.

And then, one evening last week, in the midst of all this fiery madness, as I walked home past Riksdaghuset, through Gamla Stan, toward Södermalm, I glanced at my phone and I saw the very same small and powerful young woman I first saw way back in August of 2018. This time she was being arrested for once again humbling the world’s leaders with her incorruptible, clear sighted and morally courageous behaviour in response to the unforgivable genocide happening in Palestine right before our very eyes.

I stopped in the same spot I had stopped in all those years ago and watched this audacious young woman being manhandled away from her mercy mission with her UN general assembly speech ringing in my ears “We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”

Greta Thunberg has humbled us all with her moral clarity and her ability to ignore the pressure to conform to the norm. She has humbled us all with her refusal to look away and instead to face fear. She has humbled us all with her strength be able to stand up for what is right when so few of us dare.

Right now even as we face multiple clear and present dangers, Greta Thunberg is reminding us once again that we still can behave morally and virtuously and honourably even as powerful sociopaths spray their fountains of hatred, and for that I am truly grateful.

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